At Capital City Farm, the first commercial urban farm in Trenton, New Jersey, more than 37 varieties of fruits, vegetables, and flowers grow on two formerly abandoned city-owned acres. The farm, run by the D&R Greenway Land Trust, is a financially self-sufficient operation that donates 30 percent of its produce to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen and sells the rest to nearby markets. A local community development and environmental nonprofit runs a well-established youth gardening program at the farm, which has won several awards since its founding in 2016. 

There’s no question that Capital City Farm is a success story on many levels, from repurposing a trash-strewn lot to involving the local community in its development and operations. Now the city is hoping to emulate that success, working closely with local residents as it sets out to convert additional vacant lots into community gardens. The effort is part of a recently launched plan called Fight the Blight, which will include property demolition and redevelopment. 

Trenton, population 83,000, has a disproportionate number of neglected and vacant properties: 1,500 of them in a city that covers just 7.5 square miles. As the city embarks on addressing this issue, officials are sensitive to the fact that, for residents in neglected urban neighborhoods, municipal improvement efforts can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, fixing up vacant lots and tearing down condemned buildings yields major quality of life improvements, including improving public safety and increasing community morale. But on the other hand, the sudden arrival of plans and projects developed without local input can be an unwelcome signal to residents that the future of the neighborhood is out of their hands and might not include them. 

“Trenton . . . has historically been behind the eight ball” on securing local input in revitalization efforts, said the city’s principal planner, Stephani Register. “The way we’re approaching it now is this idea of ‘let’s give the people back their power.’ If we do that, we as an administration get better participation from residents. The question is, how do you do that for communities of color who have been disenfranchised for so long because they didn’t have the right information, and the tools that are out there have been used against them.” 

An interdisciplinary team from Trenton is exploring these issues through its participation in the Lincoln Institute’s Legacy Cities Communities of Practice project. Over the past year, teams from three legacy cities (Trenton; Akron, Ohio; and Dearborn, Mich.) have met regularly to facilitate peer learning, gain insights from expert faculty on issues ranging from racial equity to fiscal health, and access resources and support to tackle entrenched citywide policy issues with place-based project approaches. Trenton’s team includes Register, mayoral aide Rick Kavin, Jamilah Harris, an analyst from the state Department of Environmental Protection, and Caitlin Fair, executive director of the nonprofit East Trenton Collaborative (ETC). 

Legacy cities like Trenton are places that have experienced population and economic decline that has left them with common infrastructure and demographic challenges. Many of them have vast areas once full of people and industry that have now been abandoned and neglected. Smaller legacy cities have many of the same challenges as larger legacy cities like Detroit or Baltimore, said Jessie Grogan, associate director of Reduced Poverty and Spatial Inequality at the Lincoln Institute. But they tend not to draw the same national attention from think tanks or large philanthropic funders, and they tend to have smaller municipal staffs and budgets. 

“These cities are kind of left to solve really complex problems on their own,” she said. “These smaller cities are in a tough spot where they have enough capacity to know what the problems are, but not enough to know what the potential solutions are or what their peer cities are doing that’s working.” The Legacy Cities Community of Practice gives them an opportunity to compare notes, get new ideas, and support each other’s work. 

Trenton, for example, is now working to engage the community in its Fight the Blight program using strategies employed in Syracuse, N.Y., and Flint, Mich., and detailed in the Lincoln Institute’s Policy Focus Report Revitalizing America’s Smaller Legacy Cities. Rather than the city taking the lead in projects like the effort to expand its community gardens, officials have turned to community organizations. Kavin said Capital City Farm has been advising the city on the youth apprenticeship aspect of the proposed community garden project. And Fair says the ETC would like to see community gardens become year-round, accessible neighborhood resources that support workforce development and a healthy community. 

“The idea is to marry [the gardens] with our youth employment program and for the city to create an opportunity for kids in the community to have a paid apprenticeship,” she said. “A goal of this initiative is to create a very public, community-oriented space that is open to everyone to use.” 

The vision is for Trenton’s new community gardens to be financially self-sustaining, providing a steady source of local jobs and local food thanks to greenhouses and hydroponic gardening that make cultivation possible during the winter months. Allowing year-round structures such as greenhouses on lots operated as community gardens required a zoning code change, which the Trenton team collaborated on and achieved by mid-2021. In the fall of 2021, the ETC began working on deciding which vacant lots in East Trenton they want to turn into community farms. 

Ultimately, the Trenton team sees the community farm project as just one way to start breaking down barriers between local government and residents and approach planning from a more holistic perspective. To that end, the city has also launched “how-to” informational sessions aimed at increasing small business owners’ access to capital and city contracts. Other sessions help homeowners figure out how to access grant money or loans to fix up their historic homes. And last year, Trenton launched an “Adopt a Lot” program that gives residents temporary access to vacant lots for their own gardens or other greenspace use. 

“With all of these programs, we’re trying to foster an environment where all local residents can have a say,” Kavin said. “Not just in their city’s planning, but also in their own future.” 

Liz Farmer is a fiscal policy expert and journalist whose areas of expertise include budgets, fiscal distress, and tax policy. She is currently a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute’s Future of Labor Research Center.

Image: Volunteers plant seeds at Capital City Farm in Trenton, New Jersey. Credit: Capital City Farm.

This article is adapted from a report on a project funded by the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy and the Water Research Foundation. Several municipal staff members in Aurora, Colorado, generously provided data and support for the project, including Lyle Whitney, Zach Vernon, and Timothy York at Aurora Water and Karen Hancock, principal planner with the City of Aurora. 

The Front Range of Colorado, an urban corridor east of the Rocky Mountains that includes Denver, Boulder, and other densely populated areas, increasingly faces a perilous combination: rapid population growth and a capricious water supply. With a semi-arid climate and a history of lengthy drought periods, the region is experiencing an increasing imbalance between water supply and demand, a situation aggravated by climate change. Water managers are faced with the challenge of securing an adequate water supply for future growth and new development.  

Our research at the University of Colorado applies an innovative methodology to water demand forecasting that provides key insights into the relationships between development decisions, water needs, and growth. This in-depth analysis of residential outdoor water use in Aurora, Colorado, uses a novel housing typology to inform 50 unique future development scenarios, providing a water blueprint for future projected growth, a methodology that can be applied to other communities. The study forecasts future water demand under various growth, climate change, and design scenarios, and demonstrates the inherent value and necessity of connecting water management and land use planning. 

Projecting Water Demand in Aurora 

The study area is the City of Aurora, Colorado, a growing municipality located in the Denver metro area. Like most communities in the region, Aurora is facing intense population growth and development pressures, with close to 2 percent annual projected growth to 2070, which will almost double the current population (Data & Demographics: Population, 2020).  

While Aurora has prioritized securing water rights to ensure the community has the needed water supply to support that growth, these are predominantly surface water supplies. They are vulnerable to drought and climate change and can be usurped by those with higher-priority rights to Colorado River water. These circumstances leave the community’s water security vulnerable, providing ample incentive for developing a better understanding of a variety of possible trajectories of future water demand, which can also inform and prioritize land use policy changes.  

Based on the best available data for population growth, land use, and water use, this study generated growth scenarios out to the year 2050. The study methodology is based on the creation of a unique housing typology, which reflects the current housing stock in Aurora. The housing types were defined by yard size, home value, and current outdoor water use. This data was then analyzed to determine the key housing characteristics that predicted significantly different water use, based on built environment characteristics. The two most significant variables were house value and pervious lot areas—in other words, larger houses with larger yards predictably used more water. This is consistent with other findings in the literature pointing to income levels and yard size as key drivers for water demand (Arbues and Villanua 2006, Dalhuisen et al. 2003, Locke et al. 2018, Rogers 2002). The analysis allowed for the classification of all residential units in the data set into eight distinct housing types.  

The scenario development was initiated by establishing a baseline growth scenario which projects full build out of Aurora’s approved master planned (MP) developments. The housing typology was matched to the expected future units in the MPs, based on an analysis of their yard sizes and home values. Using the water use data for each house type, the outdoor water demand was calculated for the projected MP developments. This calculation was used as the baseline scenario for comparison with 50 subsequently developed scenarios. 

The subsequent scenarios combine six factors: predicted development extent, pervious area, home values, climate change severity, landscape design, and level of irrigation efficiency. A portion of the scenarios includes projection of growth beyond the extent of MPs, simulating unplanned development of what is currently open space prairie lands. Because the distribution of housing types in these unplanned future development areas is unknown, the researchers used Aurora’s Unified Development Ordinance guidelines to develop scenarios with different combinations of housing types.  

Landscape design, irrigation efficiency, and climate variables were added to the scenario model as multipliers that either increase or decrease overall outdoor water use per unit area. The 50 scenarios were organized into ten groups of five scenarios, which had the same sequence of landscape design, climate change extent, and irrigation efficiency values. This allowed for a clear understanding of the impact of the multipliers and the development extent.  

The resulting scenarios address a wide set of possible future circumstances that were designed to reflect a range of realistic possible outcomes. By providing insight into how impacts may change based on factors like climate and population growth, this methodology can inform management and policy decisions related to lot size and landscaping standards. For example, the results show that having a development ordinance that limits lot sizes for single family residential development and requires at least 50 percent low-water (xeric) landscaping would yield water savings up to 35 percent.

Conclusions and Scalability 

Given the multiple constraints on sustaining future water supply in the Colorado River Basin, creating a portfolio of reasonable outcomes can be critical for managing sustainable growth. The key factors within the bounds of land use planning include growth boundaries, lot sizes and housing types, landscape design regulations (e.g., xeric requirements or turf limits), and irrigation efficiency standards.  

The results from this model show that new development that requires 50 percent xeric landscaping combined with efficient irrigation significantly reduces outdoor water demand, even when using the highest climate change impact multiplier and the greatest extent of development scenarios.  

Notably, this model uses only half-xeric yards, versus modeling the entire outdoor pervious space with xeric design. This is because the current UDO calls for low-water-use front yards, while back yards have no regulatory parameters on landscape design.  This suggests that creating a 100 percent xeric landscape yard would likely prove twice as effective. The half-xeric yard was chosen due to the guidelines of Aurora’s UDO ordinance, which requires small lot homes to have xeric designed front yards. Expanding that ordinance to 100 percent xeric landscaping for future growth would significantly contribute to meeting water supply goals, while still accommodating growth projections.  

The scenario modeling in this study provides a unique look at the coupled effects of multiple factors that influence outdoor water demand. The results show that best practices for low water use landscape design and irrigation efficiency can lower water footprints for high population growth in a warming climate, as predicted for Aurora. These outcomes reinforce the importance of integrating land use planning and water management.  

The conservative projections for climate change used in this study are likely estimates of future realities, and our results reveal that community planning that includes water smart land use zoning, building code improvements, and landscape requirements yields positive effects for future water resilience.  

Beyond the direct usefulness of this study to Aurora, much of its value lies in demonstrating that the methodology is feasible, yields reasonable results, and is scalable to larger regions.  

Many cities in the Colorado River Basin and throughout the West are facing similar growth pressures to those seen along Colorado’s Front Range. Our findings support the recommendation for jurisdictions to carefully consider where and how development occurs, before extending future populations away from the urban core through annexations of undeveloped open spaces, prairies, and greenfields. Moreover, this water demand forecasting model demonstrates the promising opportunities available for the arid West to use water-smart land use planning to create a more resilient future. 

Gretel Follingstad is a PhD candidate in Geography, Planning & Design, with a research and pedological focus on Climate Resilience Planning, in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Colorado, Denver 

Austin Troy is a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Colorado, Denver. 

Lead image: A waterwise yard in Aurora, Colorado. Credit: City of Aurora.

References 

Arbues, Fernando, and Inmaculada Villanua. 2006. “Potential for Pricing Policies in Water Resource Management: Estimation of Urban Residential Water Demand in Zaragoza, Spain.” Urban Studies 43(13): 2421–2442. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980601038255. 

Dalhuisen, Jasper M., Raymond J. G. M. Florax, Henri L. F. DeGroot, and Peter Nijkamp. 2003. “Price and Income Elasticities of Residential Water Demand: A Meta-Analysis.” Land Economics 79: 292–308. http://ron-griffin.tamu.edu/x677/readings/dalhuisen.pdf. 

Data & Demographics: Population. 2020. Aurora Colorado. https://www.auroragov.org/cms/One.aspx?portalId=16242704&pageId=16394086. 

Locke, Dexter H., Rinku Roy Chowdhury, J. Morgan Grove, Deborah G. Martin, Eli Goldman, John Rogan, and Peter Groffman. 2018. “Social Norms, Yard Care, and the Difference between Front and Back Yard Management: Examining the Landscape Mullets Concept on Urban Residential Lands.” Society & Natural Resources 31(10): 1169–1188. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2018.1481549. 

Rogers, Peter, Radhika de Silva, and Ramesh Batia. 2002. “Water Is an Economic Good: How to Use Prices to Promote Equity, Efficiency, and Sustainability.” Water Policy 4(1): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1366-7017(02)00004-1. 

This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published in APA’s Planning magazine.  

COVID-19 has turned the world upside down. When the American Planning Association’s Foresight team entered the second year of our partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the symptoms and side effects of the pandemic were reflected in nearly every trend, changing the way we live, work, and play. And while the world is still trying to flatten the COVID curve, we need to flatten others—social inequalities, the climate emergency, and the speed of technological innovation that makes it difficult to keep up. 

This year, we’re publishing the 2022 Trend Report for Planners, your foresight-driven road map for the new year and beyond. With guidance from our Trend Scouting Foresight Community, a diverse group of 31 forward-thinking thought leaders, we’ve identified what planners need to act on today, what we need to start preparing for, and what we need to better understand and continue watching throughout the year. The report also takes a look at some big-picture developments and trend patterns and what they mean for the future of planning. 

Here, take a sneak peek (in no particular order) at seven of the nearly 100 trends and signals from the report. Additional topics range from innovative ways to encourage equitable community investment to the future of data collection and analytics, the climate emergency, and political polarization. We’re also working on finding answers to some of our most pressing questions: What’s the future of transportation? How can 3D printing be a part of the solution to the housing crisis? And why should it matter to planners when Jeff Bezos starts sending tourists into space? 

Read on for some of the answers and more. 

1. CTRL + P HOUSING 

We’ve long been tracking the potential impacts of 3D printing on planning, but in the past year, the trend has moved up from our watchlist to our high-priority trend list as housing and infrastructure projects get underway. 

Specifically, we’re closely observing a development near Austin, Texas. The 3D printing company ICON has joined forces with real estate developer Lennar and architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group to build the largest community of 3D-printed homes to date. The project will print 100 energy-efficient houses that claim to be built faster, with less waste, and to last longer than conventional construction. 

The tech could prove to be an attractive solution to many issues, from the housing crisis to supply chain challenges. Some companies are even exploring 3D-printed food. While the broader impact of Austin’s 3D-printed neighborhood is yet to be seen, this is certainly a trend planners should keep a close eye on. 

2. The Great Resignation 

The term was coined by Anthony Klotz, a psychologist and professor at Texas A&M, to describe the record-high wave of people quitting their jobs in 2021. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, four million people resigned in April 2021, and by July, the Bureau had registered almost 11 million open jobs. 

The most impacted sectors are food and hospitality, comprising 6.8 percent of U.S. resignations in August 2021 alone. Outside the leisure sector, retail has been hit the hardest, with 4.7 percent in the same month. Health care, IT, construction, and transportation also have been affected. 

Looking at these numbers, the COVID-19 connection becomes very clear. Many of those who resigned were low-wage workers in frontline positions during the darkest months of the pandemic, or those who worked in industries that experienced extreme growth in the past few years. But the pandemic isn’t the only reason for this development. 

The trend of low-wage workers resigning was already building in 2019. Though it paused during the worst of the pandemic, it picked back up more intensely in 2021. That’s because the root causes—lack of benefits, minimum wage levels, and generally poor working conditions—existed well before COVID. The pandemic only added to these factors, increasing demand and burnout while introducing more safety and health concerns. 

For people who shifted to working from home (or working from anywhere—yes, that’s also in our report), the motivation to change jobs is different. Working from home means more flexibility, eliminated commutes, increased time with family and friends, and, for many, the opportunity to reconsider the so-called work-life balance. 

According to psychologist Klotz, who we are as employees has long been key to American identity. But working from home has driven people to shift their priorities and focus on life outside of work. Klotz argues that near-death situations or life-threatening illnesses usually inspire people “to take a step back and ask existential questions,” he told Business Insider. “Like, what gives me purpose and happiness in life, and does that match up with how I’m spending my time right now?” 

Employers will need to keep this in mind when hiring new staff. Companies that don’t offer certain perks in a post-COVID world will have a hard time finding competitive employees. The Great Resignation is currently spurring an increase in wages for low-income workers at a rate not seen since the Great Recession. 

These workforce trends will likely be impacted by another in the report: the development and deployment of robots has been accelerated during COVID as well. The industry sectors that are currently hit the hardest by the Great Resignation are also the ones that have been experimenting with robots. AI-powered robots are now being used in recycling facilities, for food deliveries, and in many other service industries. KFC opened its first contactless, robo-based restaurant in Moscow last year, while multiple cities in the U.S. and across the globe are now allowing for automated delivery services. 

While the connection between urban planning and automated delivery services might be obvious, it’s not clear today how the Great Resignation and tech innovations in the service industries will further affect how we plan for our communities and the people who live in them. We can already see, though, that it’s impacting how people live, work, play, and move around, which means it must factor into how we think about future economic development, land use, and transportation planning. 

3. Space Oddity 

A new space race is underway, this time among private corporations like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and the United Launch Alliance. 

This competition is fueling a revolution in launch capabilities in the U.S. and abroad that is leading to major cost reductions and sustained interest in the commodification of space. This commercialization and privatization can generally be explored in the context of three emerging trends: growing competition for commercial satellite launches, space tourism, and the long-term colonization of space. 

Right now, it’s unclear how planners will be involved in space colonization, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on. Currently, space travel mainly disrupts communities with launch sites, like Boca Chica, Texas, where test launches and failures occur. 

4. Departure from the Cave 

If your employer asks you to come back to the office a few days a week but you’re still wary about sharing a space with multiple people; if you recently went to a restaurant and couldn’t wait to get back home; or if you went to the movie theater only to change your mind at the box office, even while vaccinated, you are not alone. 

Researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, have been exploring a phenomenon called “cave syndrome.” For many, staying at home and away from people for almost two years has made it difficult to readjust to the social, public lives we once led. In general, the pandemic has caused an increase in mental health issues, including anxiety and depression. 

While many people might be comfortable with their current work-from-home situation, UC Berkeley professor Robert W. Levenson says that, especially for young people, it is critical to leave the pandemic cave, reconnect with the outside world, and (re)establish a social life and career outside the home. 

“Young people need to be in environments where unexpected things happen and where they are challenged and inspired,” he told Berkeley News. “They need to flex their emotional and perceptual muscles.” 

Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, believes reestablishing these connections will be crucial for all of us to create a “sense of common humanity and collective interests.” Emerging from our pandemic caves might take a while, but “being physically near each other and not experiencing harmful or threatening consequences is the way that our nervous systems need to relearn the foundational trust and the affiliative and cooperative potential that is so fundamental to human ultra-sociality.” 

Planners can play an essential role in addressing mental health issues like pandemic cave syndrome. Location, equitable design, and accessibility of public and green places determine how we feel and experience space, and they can be important factors in our decision to leave the house in the first place. Planning can create spaces where unexpected things happen, where we are challenged in a good way, where we are inspired. And if done right—with intentional consideration for equity, diversity, and inclusion—planning can get us out of our caves and back in public spaces. 

5. Green Signals from Across the Pond 

The report takes a deep dive into environmental concerns, like the fact that we are running out of time when it comes to the climate emergency. But we’re also observing some green signals on the horizon. 

As some European countries ban short-distance flights, cities are transitioning to a car-free era. Oslo, Norway, and Ljubljana, Slovenia, have already converted their entire downtown areas into car-free zones, while Paris and many others have implemented or are planning extensive car-free areas throughout cities. 

It’s not an entirely foreign concept in the U.S. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many American cities converted streets into shared or pedestrian zones, some permanently. Making streets a place where people can safely spend their leisure time has become a widely embraced trend and should continue to be considered by planners when imagining healthy, environmentally responsible communities. 

Another green signal from abroad is the uptick in the circular economy, an approach to sustainable production and consumption that prioritizes sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling products and materials. In 2018, China stopped taking plastics from many countries, including the U.S. As a result, these countries had to get creative about what to do with their waste. The EU adopted the Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP) in 2020, a mix of legislative and non-legislative measures. The circular economy is starting to grow in the U.S., with more retailers exploring buyback and recycling programs. And as supply chain backups continue, we could see this trend further accelerate. 

6. Zoning Reform Goes Mainstream 

Single-family housing is the dominant residential land use in the U.S., largely due to local zoning codes and maps that have remained unchanged for decades—but not for much longer. 

Many local governments are looking into zoning reform as a means of increasing housing choice and affordability and reducing racial and economic segregation. With cities like Minneapolis revising their codes to permit “missing middle” housing types in formerly restrictive districts and California and Oregon instituting statewide bans on single-family-only zoning, a movement is building, and quickly. Even at the federal level, legislators are working to tie local funding to the revision of exclusionary zoning regulations. 

Expect these measures to gain further momentum in cities and states of all sizes as housing costs, displacement, and homelessness continue to rise. 

7. Welcome to the Metaverse 

The digitalization of life continues to accelerate. The term “metaverse,” which was coined in the 1990s, has gained more attention since Facebook changed its name to Meta in October 2021. And while it doesn’t exist just yet, it might be the next step in the evolution of the internet. 

The metaverse is a computer-generated universe or “extended reality” that combines augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. According to proponents, it will be the new platform we use to socialize, conduct business, and do anything else that can be done in a virtual, 3D space. It’s expected to be as transformative to the ways we live, work, and play as the cell phone. And those of us growing tired of being on video all day can create cartoon avatars who mimic our facial expressions, wear digital outfits we buy, and take on alternate personalities. 

In his announcement about Meta, founder Mark Zuckerberg said he envisions the metaverse as “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or web page, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness.” 

As the company’s new name reveals, Meta plans to be a big player in this space. So do others in the big tech sector, ranging from Microsoft to Epic Games. Tech giants have often been accused of prioritizing profit over the common good, or as Jessa Crispin, columnist at the Guardian, put it around the time former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos briefly traveled to space, “tech billionaires [are] trying to leave the world to evade responsibility for their malevolent influence on it.” Many believe that allowing these companies control over the metaverse could be a dystopian nightmare. 

So far, it’s not clear what the metaverse will mean for privacy, how inclusive the experience will be, or how harmful content will be mitigated or avoided. There’s obviously a lot to unpack here, but it could have enormous impacts on the trajectory of our future. We face great risks repeating past mistakes from the analog world in a digital society. Ultimately, we need to think carefully and critically about how people will engage with this platform and how that will change lifestyles, behaviors, and the work of planners. 

Petra Hurtado, Ph.D., is the research director of APA. Learn more about APA’s applied research program.  

Image: Conceptual rendering of a 3D-printed community planned in Austin, Texas. Credit: ICON.

Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from “Investing for the Future,” published July 22, 2021. 
 
As governments consider major infrastructure proposals, the Lincoln Institute has published a new book that will help policy makers achieve a greater return on public investments. Edited by José A. Gómez-Ibáñez and Zhi Liu, Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives includes contributions from 30 leading international academics and practitioners on topics such as project appraisal, financing, governance, climate change, and technology. 

The book comes out at a time when governments of many countries are considering infrastructure as a policy instrument to stimulate national economies that have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The book offers case studies, data, and analyses that can help governments evaluate infrastructure proposals. 

It includes the following six takeaways to consider in any infrastructure investment package, based on extensive research into the ingredients for success: 

Think Long-Term Growth, Not Quick Stimulus. Contrary to conventional wisdom, infrastructure investment is not an effective way to provide a quick economic stimulus. It takes many years to secure the permissions and funding necessary to begin construction on a new project, and the sophisticated equipment and training required by modern construction means such projects do not offer pathways to quick employment for large numbers of unskilled workers. Infrastructure Economics and Policy explains why infrastructure investments offer few short-term impacts, even when the long-term economic impacts are clearly positive. 

Shovel-Worthy Matters, Not Shovel-Ready. The impacts of infrastructure projects depend greatly on their quality. Many infrastructure agencies are required to prepare cost-benefit analyses of the major projects or policies they are considering and of the relevant alternatives to those projects. However, few governments (if any) require the agencies to adopt the alternative with the highest net benefit. This is often because of political considerations, including concerns that cost-benefit analysis might not adequately reflect the goals of fairness and equity. While cost-benefit analyses are not perfect, they are one of the best tools available for evaluating infrastructure proposals, and agencies should be cautious about departing significantly from the option with the highest net benefit without good reason. 

Beware of Over-Confidence and Over-Optimism. A landmark analysis of some 2,000 infrastructure projects found that actual costs were significantly higher than forecast, while usage was significantly lower, as Bent Flyvbjerg and Dirk W. Bester explore in a chapter of the book. The authors identify several well-known behavioral limitations that lead to these outcomes, particularly overconfidence bias and optimism bias. Fighting these biases is difficult because they are so deeply ingrained in human nature, but the book describes measures that can help, such as holding forecasters legally accountable or using independent audits. 

Take Equity Seriously. The costs and benefits of infrastructure projects are often distributed inequitably. On the one hand, major infrastructure facilities such as highways and power plants are often built in locations where the negative impacts are felt disproportionately by low-income residents and people of color. On the other hand, the lack of access to basic infrastructure, particularly in the developing world, impairs quality of life and contributes to inequality. Governments need to take both problems seriously and enact complementary policies to address them. 

Consider Governance Challenges. State and local governments have historically been deeply involved in regulating both private and government-owned infrastructure due to important concerns including access, siting, and protecting against monopolization. However, the advent of a major new infrastructure program—particularly one focused on decarbonizing the energy system to address climate change—will increase the role of the national government. National governments are uniquely positioned to invest in new technologies that require collective action, and to mitigate the economic impact of climate change policies—for example, compensating owners of fossil fuel plants and other assets that lose their value. These and other governance challenges related to infrastructure may prove even more difficult than the financial challenges that current debates focus on. 

Invest for the Future and Address Radical Uncertainties. In the face of radical uncertainties including climate change, the pandemic, automation, and the emerging sharing economy, governments must not only fix deteriorating infrastructure, but also invest in a new generation of infrastructure that is climate-resilient and takes advantage of new technologies. This transformation will require overcoming significant institutional barriers, assessing the pros and cons of the new technologies, and putting an effective change management process in place. 

Sustainably built infrastructure is indispensable to resilient, equitable, and livable communities and regions worldwide. Through in-depth analysis, Infrastructure Economics and Policy questions the conventional wisdom about several issues, from the most efficient levels of congestion charges on routes into city centers to the belief that privatization greatly affects the performance of infrastructure. With chapters covering land value capture and other funding mechanisms; the role of infrastructure in urban form, economic performance, and quality of life, especially for disinvested communities; and other essential concepts, this new book offers evidence-based solutions and policy considerations for officials in government agencies and private companies that oversee infrastructure services, for students, and for policy-oriented lay readers alike. 

To learn more or to order a copy of Infrastructure Economics and Policy, visit https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/books/infrastructure-economics-policy.

Image Credit: shaunl via Getty Images.